VANITY SCARE
Book 11 of the Dulcie O’Neil Series
by
H.P. Mallory
Copyright ©2018 by HP Mallory
Published by HP Mallory at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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ALSO BY H.P. MALLORY
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(Over 1 million downloads of the series!)
Paranormal Romance Series:
The Jolie Wilkins Series:
(New York Times Bestselling Series!)
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Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance Series:
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Virtual Reality Romance Series:
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TABLE OF CONTENTS:
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
About VANITY SCARE:
Recently, Agent Dulcie O’Neil’s life has been anything but calm.
Even though she was ultimately able to defeat the evil that was Meg, Dulcie still bears scars that run deep: her body is at war with itself, owing to all the different races of creature that now war within her veins.
To make matters worse, things with her ex-boyfriend, Knight, aren’t exactly comfortable. In fact, they’re the opposite of comfortable. So when Dulcie finds herself working in close proximity with Knight yet again, sparks are going to fly. Not the good kind…
And Splendor’s resident demon, Dagan, has gone missing. As if Dulcie didn’t already have enough on her plate, she’ll be thrust into yet another risky situation when Dagan’s demon brother, Darion, suddenly shows up in Splendor, looking for his brother.
Darion is fuming because Dagan absconded with his wife years earlier and Darion wants to teach his younger brother a lesson about family loyalty. Unluckily for vampire Bram, he’s deeply involved in this family dispute, to the point that his life is on the line.
Can Dulcie protect Dagan and Bram while at the same time controlling the changes that are wreaking havoc within her body? Find out in the next installment of the Dulcie O’Neil series!
PROLOGUE
Dulcie
I was running.
My footsteps were the only sound against the asphalt. Otherwise, the night air was still and silent with the exception of the doleful call of an owl nearby and the chirping of crickets.
The night had a certain chill to it, something cold at the moment, but as soon as my blood started pumping, I’d welcome the coolness.
I picked up my pace, enjoying the fact that I seemed to be the only person awake at this hour. I started up the base of a large hill, looking forward to cresting the top.
Gritting my teeth, I closed my eyes and pushed my legs into the ground. The asphalt leveled off and my muscles relaxed. I opened my eyes with a grin. But as soon as I focused on what lay ahead, my smile faded.
A man stood directly in front of me—maybe ten feet away.
I stopped in my tracks, panting as my heart pounded.
He was dressed in black. His hooded sweatshirt hung low over his face. He dropped the hood, and in the moonlight, I recognized the broad build, the raven black hair and the glowing blue eyes as belonging to only one person.
“Knight.”
I sucked in a breath.
He was just as beautiful as he’d ever been. The moonlight heightened the angular planes of his face, throwing shadows beneath his cheeks and the square lines of his jaw.
“Dulcie.”
Neither of us said anything for a long time. Instead, we both just stood there, staring at each other like nervous high school kids at a formal dance.
“Let me guess,” I started, needing to break the silence. I fought to catch my breath, “I’m asleep?”
He chuckled and the sound was deep and rich. It made me want to close my eyes and return to a time when things weren’t what they were now, a time before the proverbial shit had hit the fan. A time when Knight and I were in love and things weren’t complicated. A time before we’d broken up.
“You’re asleep,” he admitted.
As a Loki, a magical creature, Knight had the ability to interrupt my sleep by thrusting himself into my dreams. And for some reason, he’d chosen to recreate in dreamscape the first time we’d ever met. I’d been jogging on this exact road and I’d come across him the same way I just had. He’d been standing in the middle of the road, wearing a dark, hooded sweatshirt and I’d thought he was there to attack me.
“Fancy meeting you here?” I asked, feeling awkward again. I wasn’t sure what else to say. The only other alternative I had was to say nothing at all but the silence between us was overwhelming.
“I thought this was poetic,” he answered and glanced around himself, taking in his surroundings before he faced me again. There was another long stretch of uncomfortable silence.
“The first time we met,” I started but he interrupted me.
“Was right here.”
“So am I supposed to freeze you with my fairy dust?” I asked sheepishly, hating how completely idiotic I felt.
“That didn’t exactly work the way you hoped last time, did it?” he chuckled. The sound of his laugh suddenly reminded me of how things used to be. How carefree we used to be. It was the sound of nostalgia, of moments spent in loving exploration. It was the sound of an innocence that had been trampled to death before being strangled.
But going back to Knight’s comment, no, my attempts to freeze him with my fairy dust hadn’t exactly worked. He’d shaken off my Mr. Freeze impersonation as easy as you please.
“Then I’m supposed to zap you with a lightning bolt?” I continued.
“Please don’t.”
I smiled but suddenly felt like there was an anvil sitting in my stomach.
“Why did you contact me like this?” I asked, finally needing to cut to the chase.
He nodded as though he’d expected this question. Then he smiled again but it was a smile that was self-conscious. A smile that was heavy with the understanding of how things used to be compared to how they were now. “In honor of the past, can we go somewhere more private?”
It was the same question he’d asked me all those years ago and the realization brought tears to my eyes. They burned in the cold night air.
“The park up the street?” I asked, clearing my throat so my voice wouldn’t crack.
He smiled and the gesture crushed me, made me lose my breath. I wanted to scream or cry. Maybe both.
“Lead the way.”
We walked in silen
ce, side by side, until we reached the park. Of course it was desolate at this time of night. I didn’t say anything as I started for the swing set. Knight followed me. We both took a seat and began to sway softly. I stared down at the gravel beneath my feet and wondered how it was that we’d gotten to this point.
“So much has happened,” Knight said softly.
“So much.” I took a deep breath and looked at him, immediately regretting it. “Why are you here, Knight?”
He nodded and grew quiet again.
“Knight,” I said, my voice sounding hollow. “Why are you here?”
He looked at me and it took all my strength not to break his gaze.
“I don’t know,” he said finally and shook his head. “I just… felt like I had to… see you.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t and I don’t like the way things ended.”
I didn’t like the way things ended either. Considering everything we’d been through and how close I thought we were, the way things ended hadn’t provided me any closure and I was pretty sure the same went for Knight.
“There wasn’t exactly any closure for either of us.”
He swallowed hard. “I’m sorry for the way I ended things… so abruptly.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting but it wasn’t this. Maybe I’d hoped this visit would have been along the lines of something more… positive? There was something deep down inside me that was disappointed. That something had expected more from him, had wanted more from him. Maybe the truth was that I’d wanted Knight to fight for this, for us. I’d wanted him to champion me and our tattered relationship.
But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, I told myself. Because there was no way you could just go back to how things were. Not after you witnessed what happened between Knight and Meg…
And that was the truth. Every time I remembered the visual of Knight having sex with Meg, the woman who had fucked up my life, I felt sick to my stomach. And, yes, I realized that during that time, I’d also been magically coerced into having sex with someone else but the difference was that Knight had never had to witness it. He’d never had to see it with his own two eyes. And even though we were both basically guilty of the same crime, I couldn’t wash the visual away. I couldn’t just turn a blind eye to the memory of my boyfriend inside that…
“If you’re here because you feel guilty, don’t,” I said, my voice coming out more harshly than I intended. “Things are what they are. Things happened and those things were impossible for us to overcome.”
He nodded and shuffled his feet in the gravel. “I didn’t want us to ever end up here… for what it’s worth.”
“Neither did I.”
He was quiet again for a few seconds, dropping his gaze to his feet. When he looked at me again, his eyes were heavy. “I considered moving away so I could just… get away from it all and start over somewhere else.”
I laughed. “So did I.”
“Yet, here we both are.”
“Yet, here we both are.”
He nodded and inhaled deeply. “Are things going to continue to feel like this between us?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Time’s supposed to heal all wounds, right?” he asked, sounding hopeful but sad all the same.
“That’s what they say, right?”
But I didn’t want to think about time healing all wounds. I wanted a fat, little fairy godmother with a sweet smile and a perfectly appointed bun to pop out of the ether with her full emerald ball gown and her matching green wand. And with a bibbidi bobbidi boo, I wanted her to simply erase everything that had happened over the last few months.
But, of course that was never going to happen.
“Things are what they are, Knight,” I said as I stopped swinging and stood up. “And whatever happens from here on out, it has to get easier. I mean, it can’t get any harder right?”
He stopped swinging. “Right.”
“So we just do what adults do and we face… whatever this is that we’re facing and we smile during the hard parts and we… just survive.”
“That’s a good way to put it,” he said and grew quiet again. The expression on his face said he wasn’t content with this conversation just as I wasn’t.
“Take care of yourself, Knight Vander,” I said with a small smile.
He looked up at me like he was surprised I was ending the conversation. Rather than saying anything, though, he just nodded sadly.
I didn’t wait for a response but turned around and started walking back towards the road, leaving the man I still loved in the darkness of the park.
When I woke up, there were tears streaming down my cheeks.
ONE
Quillan
“It’s just… so much,” I said.
“I know,” answered Christina.
There were flowers everywhere. Everywhere. Not like, “wow, this garden is so pretty, there’s flowers everywhere,” but like an “it’s the end of the world and the flowers have finally risen up and defeated mankind in a blaze of pollen and glory” kind of everywhere.
The floor. The ceiling. The walls. Busting up through the tiles, curling out of the air vents, lifting the refrigerator a few inches off the ground. Hopefully, it was still plugged in.
“It just kind of happened,” Christina continued, walking into the center of the room. She ran her hand along a very large, pulsating green vine that had draped itself over the island and out the open window. At least it had had the decency not to break the glass.
“I was trying to help Timothy grow”—Timothy being a rather stubborn tomato plant Christina kept insisting was supposed to be growing strawberries—“and fairies don’t do spells, we just kind of feel our way through our magic, you know, so I did, and now…” She gestured helplessly around the room and clasped her hands together. I couldn’t tell if she was excited or panicking.
“Now this.” I crossed my arms, shifted my weight, and just kind of stared at it all. “Huh.”
“Yeah.” Christina bit her lip.
“I mean.” I lifted one hand and waved it lamely. “Do we… leave it here?” It was clearly alive, and not in the way all plants are alive: the way rabbits and dogs and bears are alive. Which was to say it probably wouldn’t kill us if we left it alone, but it was in our goddamn kitchen, so leaving it alone was going to become a problem very shortly.
And I still hadn’t had my coffee.
“We can.” Christina gave the large vine a pat and it moved a little closer to her, humming from an orifice it didn’t fucking have. “He’s still super sweet, and he’s trying so hard.”
“He’s… wait, hold up—is this all Timothy?” I gestured to the impossibly large vine.
“Yep.”
“Oh, dear God.” This, this was one plant. One single, not-tomato-definitely-strawberries-I-promise plant. “Christina, I don’t even… can you make him smaller? At all?”
“Nope.”
So matter-of-fact. Like I’d asked if it was cloudy outside. Like there wasn’t a hungry plant monster getting its leaves all up in our pantry.
Christina squealed and nearly scared the life out of me as she ran across the room, vaulting over green stems and ducking under leaves the size of umbrellas. “Look! He did it!”
There was a soft popping sound, and she turned around holding the biggest goddamn strawberry I’d ever seen.
“It worked?” I asked helplessly. Incredulously
“Yes!” She hugged the strawberry to her chest and rocked it back and forth like a baby. It was still a little green at the top.
The plant gurgled around us, and I didn’t want to know how. But it was almost like it was purring.
“Christina, can we… it…”
“Him,” she corrected me.
“Him… I don’t know, can we move him to the yard at least?”
The stems moved out of Christina’s way so she could set the strawberry on the counter by the sink.
Flower petals reached out to pet her arms, which wasn’t creepy at all.
“Sure, totally.”
“Great,” I said.
She turned to the sink and washed the strawberry. Then, she whistled and patted the plant. And, um, didn’t move it to the backyard.
And I just kind of stood there.
I turned to the nearest leaf and nodded like it was a colleague. “Nice weather, right?”
The plant gurgled again, but the gurgling probably wasn’t for me. Christina was drying off the strawberry with a towel and telling Timothy what a good job he’d done in growing it. “I’m so proud of you, Tim.”
I shook my head.
Christina talks to plants. All fairies can, I guess, but Christina has an especially green thumb. Plants like her. She has whole conversations with the trees and the flowers in the backyard, all the time, and she tries to get me to do it, too. And it’s fine. But it’s like trying to talk to somebody’s work friends when their job is medical bioengineering and yours is, like, tech support, not even. It’s a whole different world, different protocols. Like overalls vs. black ties.
What the hell is the polite thing to say to the plant your girlfriend just supersized?
“Nice strawberry,” I commented. And I got backhanded by a giant leaf.
“See? He likes you,” said Christina reassuringly, but she wasn’t looking at me. So maybe Timothy said something?
“I, um,” I started. “I like Timothy, too.” Seemed like a decent response. I turned to the nearest leaf and tried to pat it affectionately, imagining I looked like a robot trying to figure out how love works. The leaf shied away.
“Yeah, that’s fair,” I muttered, and I stuck my hands in my pockets.
The doorbell rang.
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